CfP: Enchanted reception: Religion and the supernatural in medieval Troy narratives 

Call for Papers :

Enchanted reception: Religion and the supernatural in medieval Troy narratives  

Date: Thursday-Friday, 3-4 June 2021
Place: Ghent University
If necessary due to the current circumstances, we will arrange a hybrid version (partly online), or a strictly digital version.

Enchanted Reception is a two-day workshop with the aim of exploring the place of enchantment, myth, and religion in both Eastern and Western medieval narratives about Troy, or narratives that are influenced by motifs related or parallel to the narrative of the Trojan war. Together with scholars specialising in the different language traditions of medieval literature, we aim to explore the following questions from a transnational approach:

•    How did contemporary (e.g. literary and socio-cultural) developments influence medieval adaptations of the supernatural and pagan religion in medieval Troy narratives?
•    What role does the Troy motif play in other literary works?
•    How are rationalization and “Christianization” used to deal with the medieval unease evoked by certain aspects of ancient mythology?
•    From a comparative perspective, how can we map such processes transnationally, e.g. in the different language and literature traditions of the medieval world?
•    How do these questions engage with themes such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and cross-cultural connections?

Please send your abstract to Dr Tine Scheijnen (tine.scheijnen@ugent.be) or Dr Ellen Söderblom Saarela (ellen.soderblomsaarela@ugent.be) no later than 15 January 2021. Colleagues who have submitted an abstract will be notified by 1 February 2021.

This workshop is organized as part of and supported by the ERC project Novel Echoes and the FWO project The romance between Greece and the west (see https://www.novelsaints.ugent.be/).

If you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact Tine or Ellen. We look very much forward hearing from you and receiving your abstracts!